LibGuides: Digital Humanities: Tools

Data Visualization Tools: Space

Annotation Studio
Annotation Studio is a suite of collaborative web-based annotation tools currently under development at MIT.

The tools listed and described here focus on the spatial visualization of humanities data, including collaboratively developed maps.

ArcGIS
A complete system built by ESRI for designing and managing solutions through the application of geographic knowledge.
GeoTime for Law Enforcement
A 3D-enabled tool with video-production capabilities to aid in visual analysis and reporting of location data over time. Specifically designed for Law Enforcement
HistoryPin
A collaborative tool to share images history across time and space, and place those memories on maps and timelines.
Hypercities
HyperCities is a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.
Neatline
Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, it opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation.
OpenLayers: Free Maps for the Web
A tool to develop dynamic maps for any web page using data from any source.
Quantum GIS
Quantum GIS (QGIS) is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) licensed under the GNU General Public License. QGIS is an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). It runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, Windows and Android and supports numerous vector, raster, and database formats and functionalities.
Spatial Humanities
A project of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship
Storify
Storify users tell stories by collecting updates from social networks, amplifying the voices that matter to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. Discover meaningful social media from the best storytellers online, including journalists, bloggers, editors and people like you, too.
TimeMapper
TimeMapper is an open-source project of Open Knowledge Foundation Labs. It is possible thanks to a set of awesome open-source components including TimelineJS, ReclineJS, Leaflet, Backbone and Bootstrap. You can find the full open-source source for TimeMapper on GitHub here.
Tooling Up for Digital Humanities
This web site is produced by Tooling Up for Digital Histories, a collaboration between the Spatial History Project and the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University and many others to compile, create, and share new tools for digital research in the humanities at Stanford and beyond. The collaboration has been funded by the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities at Stanford.
WhatWasthere
WhatWasThere connect historical photographs to Google Maps' Street View function to see how today's streets looked in the past.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Tools for Collaboration

The tools listed here include online services, downloadable software, and various apps you may want to try on your mobile device. Caveat: some of the downloadables may inlcude bugs that may render your app or even your device inoperable.

A2iA: Artificial Intelligence & Image Analysis
A2iA is the worldwide leading developer of natural handwriting recognition, Intelligent Word Recognition (IWR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) technologies and products for the payment, mail, document and forms processing markets.
Digital Innovation Lab (diPH)
diPH is a flexible, repurposable, fully extensible digital public humanities toolkit designed for non-technical users. It enables administrative users to build web-based community projects that combine interactive historical maps, tags, categories, metadata, and multimedia objects (including videos, web pages, images, placemarkers, and virtual walking tours). WordPress’s plugin architecture allows for open and unlimited enhancement of features and functionalities.
Evernote
Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet and the web.
Mendeley
Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research.
Scripto
A free, open source tool enabling community transcriptions of document and multimedia files.
Sophie
Sophie is open source software for writing, reading and visualizing rich media documents in an interactive, networked environment. The program emerged from the desire to create an easy-to-use application that would allow authors to combine text, images, video, and sound quickly and simply, but with precision and sophistication. Sophie's users are interested in creating robust, elegant, networked, texts and multimedia works without having programming knowledge or training in the use of more complex and costly tools, such as Flash.
TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics.
The Humanities HyperMedia Centre
The Humanities HyperMedia Centre is an innovative initiative for collaborative research, teaching and learning in the digital environment.
Zotero
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Data Visualization Tools: Time

These tools focus on the temporal dimensions of digital humanities, and feature tools like timelines.

HistoryPin
A collaborative tool to share images history across time and space, and place those memories on maps and timelines.
HyperStudio
MIT’s HyperStudio – Laboratory for Digital Humanities explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of education and research in the humanities.
Neatline
Neatline allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, it opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation.
Storify
Storify helps making sense of what people post on social media. Our users curate the most important voices and turn them into stories.
Timesheets.js
The goal of this project is to rely on declarative W3C standards (namely, SMIL Timing and SMIL Timesheets) to synchronize HTML content.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Media Production Tools

These tools enable users to collaborate and annotate online videos.

GigaPan
Explore, create, and share stunning high–resolution images.
The Humanities HyperMedia Centre
The Humanities HyperMedia Centre is an innovative initiative for collaborative research, teaching and learning in the digital environment.
Lytro
The Lytro camera lets you create living pictures
that you can endlessly refocus after you take them.
Share your pictures online, and your friends can
instantly refocus them just like you do.
Microsoft Pix
Shoot wraparound panoramas or full synths, share them with friends, and publish them to Bing.
Popcorn.js
Popcorn.js is an HTML5 media framework written in JavaScript for filmmakers, web developers, and anyone who wants to create time-based interactive media on the web. Popcorn.js is part of Mozilla's Popcorn project.
Processing
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Initially developed to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing also has evolved into a tool for generating finished professional work.
Renderforest
"Renderforest is cloud based video maker for creating intro videos for YouTube, explainer animations, kinetic typography, product or service promotional videos, music visualizations, wedding or travel slideshows, mobile app promotions, event invitations, corporate presentations, infographics and a lot more."
Scripto
A free, open source tool enabling community transcriptions of document and multimedia files.

Working with DH Data

Raw and interpreted data is more available to DH scholars than it has ever been. These sites provide data as well as information on gathering data for research.

Digging into Data Challenge
The Digging into Data Challenge aims to address how "big data" changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials available for research in the humanities and the social sciences--ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to information generated by Internet-based activities and mobile communications, administrative data from public agencies, and customer databases from private sector organizations
ImpactStory
ImpactStory aggregates altmetrics: diverse impacts from your articles, datasets, blog posts, and more.
JSTOR Data for Research
Data for Research (dfr.jstor.org) is a free, self-service tool that allows computer scientists, digital humanists, and other researchers to select and interact with content on JSTOR. Created in 2008, Data for Research enables exploration of both scholarly journal literature (more than 7 million journal articles) and a set of primary resources (26,000 19th Century British Pamphlets).